In the author's note in her latest novel The Fire and the Rose, Cadwallader describes how Eleanor "stayed with me". She wondered how Eleanor would manage in the village as the only child who could read and write.

In 1276, Eleanor is an orphan and living in Lincoln. With little prospect of marriage because of her birthmark, Eleanor works as a housemaid for a wool merchant. "She had hoped to show him her skills with quill and ink but the day she arrived, he had barely paused from his work to look at her".

Eleanor, however, dreams of working as a scribe and even rejects a proposal of marriage from an estate bailiff, telling him, "I can write . . . I have skills I want to use for more than estate accounts".

Sent to buy spices, Eleanor meets Asher a Jew who works for a spice merchant. She is wary of the Jews, in a city where prejudice is entrenched, after the Jews were accused of luring a boy to his death in a bizarre ritual including crucifixion and blood.

Little Hugh the Martyr's tomb in the cathedral is visited by crowds of pilgrims, resulting in huge profits for the church.

Eleanor falls in love with Asher and they begin an illicit love affair forbidden by both the law and the church.

The Fire and the Rose however is more than a love story, it is an ambitious novel spanning the 15 years that saw the persecution of the Jews by the English King intensify. Mass imprisonment, executions, increased taxation and the requirement to wear an identifying yellow badge culminates in 1290 with the expulsion of all Jews from England.

Cadwallader relates both her own horror at discovering this and the story of the owner of the B&B, where she stayed in Lincoln, calling it "the first holocaust".

Cadwallader intersperses blank verse throughout her novel, imagining the stones of the walls of the town commenting and lamenting, like a Greek chorus.

She says that to her, "the walls of Lincoln were the perfect witness to the horrors of the persecution of the Jews... [reflecting] the ways we use stones and walls to memorialise people and events".

The Fire and the Rose is a beautifully written, thought-provoking exploration of prejudice towards minorities, an issue that is as relevant today as it was in the 13^th century.